Jonathon Keats likes hanging out with slime mould. The American experimental philosopher has spent much of the past year investigating some of the most pressing issues facing our planet – from climate change to gun violence – with the help of his unique team: a half-a-billion-year-old species usually found foraging on forest floors on every continent except Antarctica. Our salvation, he hopes, might be hiding in the goo.

Slime moulds form their own part of the bio-genetic tree and are considered a superorganism in the same way as a beehive. Slime moulds are made up of many genetically distinct parts, known as nuclei, that make decisions together to survive and thrive. And it’s this intriguing characteristic that makes slime mould such an intriguing area of research.

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This week, after months of research, Keats and his colleagues at the Plasmodium Consortium, an independent policy institute based at Hampshire College in the United States, sent out letters of recommendation to UK ministers, urging them to rethink policies around plastic waste, pollution, and how to manage borders after Brexit – all based on the findings of his slime mould observations.

Keats sees human society as a superorganism, but one that hasn’t quite figured out how to operate effectively yet. “What one person does can impact everybody,” he says. “Think back 50,000 years where the hand axe was state-of-the-art. There's no way in which someone with a hand axe could affect everybody on the planet. Now it is entirely possible and we see it happening in terms of climate change.”

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This is where slime mould come in. The past few years have revealed a lot about what the different types of slime mould can do. In one experiment, it was found that they are able to organise themselves intelligently and can remember or forget where they have been or found food. In an experiment first carried out by professor Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England in 2010, slime mould was used to solve spatial design problems. On a map of the United States, Adamatzky placed oats – which contain nutrients slime mould can’t resist – on every major city and let the slime mould distribute itself to get to the oats. What he ended up with is a recreation of the US national highway system – an incredibly efficient network that came about as the result of rigorous civil engineering. “The slime mould is able to work as a computer would work to calculate what the best distribution would be, what the best network would be in order to cover all of those nodes of nutrient,” says Keats.

Based on this, Keats considered whether slime mould could help with more abstract problems. So far, the consortium has tackled border policy, drug addiction, environmental regulation, food and routing public transport. They have applied this to specific problems in the US, writing to officials in the Trump administration, and in the UK.

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This week, Keats wrote to home secretary Amber Rudd recommending the government should continue to allow freedom of movement of European Union citizens and other migrants after Brexit. But his recommendations weren’t based on political or economic analysis, they were based on slime. The consortium modelled the different resources and skill sets available to individual nation states with different types of nutrient, placing them on either side of a petri dish. In one, a plastic border separated the two, symbolising a legal barrier or a physical barrier such as Trump’s US-Mexico wall. When there was no border, the slime mould not only thrived but did even better when the two populations of slime mould met.

“What we can learn from this is first of all having open borders, or in the case of Brexit, maintaining free passage, free movement and also opening the borders more broadly to other populations worldwide would be beneficial from the standpoint of the United Kingdom,” he says. Keats has also written to Michael Gove, the UK secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, urging for better protection of the environment even to the detriment of short-term economic growth. Fracking, he suggests, should be banned immediately and the 25-year plan to curb plastic waste should be expedited.

In another experiment, the consortium placed slime mould into a petri dish where environmental degradation was modelled with saline – because slime mould actively avoids salt – and material wealth modelled with nutrients. On one side, the nutrient and saline were both in high concentration (analogous to lots of cars and lots of smog) and on the other side they were both in low concentration (representing environmentally friendly transport and cleaner air). “We found that the slime mould went away from the high nutrient – that is to say high material wealth – at the expense of environmental degradation in favour of the opposite,” says Keats. “In this simple model it is better to do with less in order to have a better environment, an environment that is less afflicted by all of the material good is what we might want.”

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Keats concedes there are limitations to the slime mould investigations – they are simplistic models that have yet to be replicated in the human world. But what he’s hopeful that policymakers will be receptive to the ideas highlighted by his slime mould experiments and that other laboratories will replicate the findings. On the issue of gun violence, experiments using strobe lights to symbolise an attack are already at a conceptual stage.

Humans already use modelling to solve complex problems. But looking at the slime mould provides a different perspective. “Economics is based on modelling but it's full of bias, so this is a way of exploring possible blind spots,” Keats says. “The models that come into play for economists are far more complex and that may mean they are more nuanced, more rich, and they are connected with reality. But it may also mean that they are less transparent in terms of the assumptions that went into them and the interpretations that come out of them."

While Keats stresses that these models are valuable, they are too quickly blindly followed by policymakers and the public. “It’s too easy to take them as equivalent to reality,” he says. “But by bringing slime moulds in to address our problems we might potentially get beyond the selfish ways in which we tend to go about our policymaking.”